Who Discontinued My Cheese?

You can’t make spaghetti flan without Heinz Spaghetti with Tomato and Cheese Sauce. Unfortunately, the venerable spaghetti with cheese product appears to have gone the way of the Dodo, at least in the US and the UK. In the US, the only Heinz spaghetti I can find is Spaghetti in Tomato Sauce (without cheese!) and that’s imported from Britain, but at least you can buy it by the case. In the UK, Heinz offers a wide range of tinned pasta varieties like Spaghetti PLUS Pepperoni or My Little Pony Pasta Shapes but from what I can tell, there’s no Spaghetti with Tomato and Cheese sauce on offer.

Dodo Chaplet, seen here wearing a Spaghetti Os skirt.

But all is not lost. There are places around the world where you can still get a can of Heinz Spaghetti with cheese in it. The Australians even have a version with extra cheese! New Zealanders have it too. Alas, my Kickstarter to raise funds for a Australian spaghetti fact-finding junket never got off the ground.

But as luck would have it, we took a family vacation to Canada this past summer. And there, on the shelf of a convenience store in the small Bay of Fundy village of Alma, sat cans of Heinz Spaghetti in Tomato Sauce With Cheese conveniently located next to the toilet paper and feminine care products. Fantastic!

And it’s bilingual!

If a trip to Australia or Canada isn’t practical, there are other options for the spagflan enthusiast. Maybe the simplest thing to do is to use regular Heinz Spaghetti (without cheese) and add your own cheese. Or you might use another brand like Campbell’s (formerly Franco-American) Spaghetti in Tomato and Cheese Sauce.

WWJPD? Research and analysis, of course. Here are the ingredients and nutrition facts for some of the options available in the US plus the Canadian import. I’ll try a couple of them, but I need to pick up some flan rings first.

I liked your vacation photos. I’d go for the echt Heinz spaghetti in tomato sauce with cheese – accept no substitutes! Jon Pertwee would not allow the shining purity of spaghetti flan to be adulterated with ersatz ingredients.